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Student Life;A Lesson in Limbo

Paul Battles is a medievalist in his sixth year of doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jennifer Marshall, a student of German literature, is in her fifth year at Yale. Both Ph.D. candidates are preparing to test the academic job market this December, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, the premier job fair for their disciplines. Their days already have the variety and independence that represent much of what they prize in the academic life. They just never seem to end.

The 1990's were supposed to be a good decade to go to graduate school: a generation of senior faculty was about to retire, opening an abundance of assistant professorships for the first time since the 60's. Applications to graduate programs soared. The number of new Ph.D.'s grew each year. But the downsizing of academe has instead produced the worst job market in decades. As professors retire, financially pressed universities are cutting tenure-track positions. In their place, they use graduate students like Mr. Battles and Ms. Marshall, and part-time adjuncts -- often new Ph.D.'s who can't find full-time posts.

Especially for those in the humanities, supply has turned on demand; they are needed more as graduate students then as faculty. Some graduate teaching assistants, like those at Yale who staged a grade strike last winter, accuse universities of exploiting them as cheap labor and try to form unions. The more common response is to work themselves harder than any boss would, to build a resume that will stand out.

At a certain point, there is no turning back from what can seem like impossible competition, and Mr. Battles and Ms. Marshall have reached it. If they are lucky, they will find permanent jobs. If not, the long apprenticeship that prepares a person for only one job, that of university professor, will have to be its own reward.

Mr. Battles's weeks are structured around teaching, as they have been since his first semester. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, from 1 to 3 P.M., he teaches two classes of Rhetoric 105, a composition course for those of Illinois's 6,000 freshmen who do not pass a writing placement test. It is for required introductory courses like this that public universities, in particular, depend on graduate students. Each class has 22 students.

He has office hours after class on Mondays and by appointment an hour or two each week. Wednesday afternoons, he attends a seminar, an exploration of Piers Plowman, the 14th-century English epic.

That leaves Tuesdays and Thursdays "to spend pretty much as I want," Mr. Battles said. And Sundays, too: He works six days a week to fit his research into his teaching and course work.

This semester, he is pushing hard on his dissertation, an analysis of an Anglo-Saxon poetic translation of the Book of Genesis. But he is also preparing papers to deliver at three academic conferences, and a fourth paper to submit for publication.

At Illinois, teaching is the main source of financial aid for graduate students in the humanities and social sciences. (In the sciences, as elsewhere, most aid comes from research grants, and students teach much less.) In all but two semesters, Mr. Battles has taught two courses, a full faculty load. For that he is paid $10,336 a year, and his tuition is waived. Because of the teaching, Illinois expects students to take seven years to earn a Ph.D.

The average salary of an English professor at Illinois is $47,500.

Sharing an apartment a few blocks from campus with a roommate, he gets by with help from his parents in Germany, which he finds awkward at the age of 27. "I stay afloat," he said. "If the car doesn't break down, I'm O.K."

Illinois has a budding Graduate Employees' Organization that lobbies the administration to listen to its needs, but it has no bargaining power. He has not joined, in part because he thinks the English Department treats him well; teaching assistant jobs are available every year, and after, if the job search goes poorly, adjunct positions offer a safety net.

He knows, he said, that public universities have few options as states hold down budgets while enrollments stay high: pay professors less, increase class sizes, use more teaching assistants. But he also understands the complaints of exploitation.

"People who get into this are idealists, closet romantics -- at least, I am," he said. "And I think one of the things that offends them is to discover their universities are acting just like corporations."

On a Friday afternoon, he met his rhetoric classes in the library and showed them how to use databases in research. "The big problem in research," he told them, "is finding what you want." He handed back papers and they turned in new ones. He will read 264 student papers this semester.

In New Haven, walking across the Yale campus, Jennifer Marshall paused to consider what life would be like if she taught two courses instead of one. She had just left her German II class, which meets five days a week. She began calculating: Her 14 students, freshmen and upperclassmen, write essays every two weeks . . . she takes 15 minutes to read each . . . there is weekly homework and tests . . . that's manageable, but double that and. . .

"My work on my dissertation would definitely slow," she said of her research on images of women and violence in 19th century German fiction. "And I'd get rid of my committee work immediately." She enjoys her contact with faculty and administrators as a student member of the graduate school's executive committee, a policy-making group.

That morning she had taken a bus in from nearby Branford, where she lives with her husband, Ray, a nurse. She arrived at 8:15 in the office she shares with two other students and then went to Harkness Hall, home of the German Department, where she typed exercises for the day's class into a computer, printed them out and made copies.

She had a planning meeting for Yale's new graduate-student center before her 10:30 class, and so she had broken a personal rule and prepped for the class the night before. "Teaching is something to which you can devote unlimited time," she said, "so I limit myself by preparing for my classes each morning."

Despite the complaints of exploitation by some graduate students at Yale, most teach much less than those at public universities. Like most, Ms. Marshall, who is 26 did not teach at all her first two years while she did her seminar work, supported by a Yale fellowship.

From her third year on, she has taught one course a semester, plus summer school. This year, counting a $1,000 award for teaching excellence, her stipend is $12,000. She hopes to win a Fulbright scholarship next year, her last, to study in Germany. If not, Yale awards full-year dissertation fellowships to free advanced students from teaching. Yale's goal is to confer degrees in only six years.

Those at Yale who teach two courses a semester, she suggested, do so because they need the extra money; often, they are older and have families. "I wouldn't recommend graduate school to anyone with a family," she said.

She and her husband, she said, went into debt her first years at Yale, when he was in nursing school and they lived on her stipend. "That was to be expected," she said. "Now we're getting out of debt."

Like Mr. Battles, she thinks she has been treated well. "When I was an undergraduate, I worked a lot of hours outside my education to finance my education," she said. "Now my education is financing my education."

The union movement at Yale, she said, may partly be a response to the isolated nature of graduate study in the humanities and social sciences, where it has the strongest support.

"Some people say the science students weren't interested in unionization because their stipends are paid by the Federal Government and they get more," she said. "They get maybe $2,000 a year more, and that's something, but it's not as much as they make it out to be. I think it's more that they get daily feedback in their laboratories, while we're told, 'Okay, go off and write your dissertations.' "

Ms. Marshall said she learned her first year that the predicted openings weren't materializing, "that it was not going to be easy to get a job. I knew I had to be superlative, that I had to have a record that would give no one a reason to throw my resume on the rejections."

In addition to her dissertation, this semester she is writing her fourth paper, to present at a regional meeting of the Modern Language Association.

Stephen Watt, an associate professor of English at Indiana University, has written about the pressures that "professionalization" puts on students: not only the stress of publishing enough papers to win tenure a generation ago, but the financial and emotional costs of attending conferences while prolonging the graduate years.

"Against a lousy job market, what it comes down to is, you not only have to teach well, be smart and be professional, but even if you do all those things, you still may be unsuccessful," he said.

In 1993, 6,006 Ph.D.'s were awarded in the humanities, 27 percent more than a decade earlier, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, while some tenure-track openings were attracting as many as 800 applications.

Mr. Battles enjoys teaching and knows that the experience is essential for his resume. But he didn't realize how much time it drew from his research until last semester, when he won a dissertation fellowship and for the first time did not teach.

"It's a lot more intrusive than it seems when you only count the hours," he said. "There always seems to be a break in the day. Your time is segmented. There's not only the preparation, but it's always in your mind."

His days start at 9 A.M., he said, and "end in terms of work around 11 at night." He paused. "I don't power all the way through. I hang out with my roommate. Or I see someone at a coffee shop. I find that if you work 24 hours a day, you tend to be reclusive."

At Yale, Ms. Marshall's class is followed by office hours after lunch, when she is usually free to grade papers. The rest of the afternoon is spent at the Sterling Memorial Library, in meetings, or in her office or the department.

Because commuting puts her on campus for the entire day, she sees other assistants and her faculty more than many students do. Still, like most students at the dissertation stage, she has discussed her work with her adviser, Jeffrey Sammons, only a few times this year.

"He doesn't chase me down," she said. "He waits until I'm ready, and I'm very meticulous about being ready. I don't give him 5 or 10 pages. I wait until I have 70 pages that hold together as a chapter."

In late afternoon or early evening, she takes a bus home, where her husband is often about to leave for a night shift. She brings her notes and books into the living room, curls up with a laptop computer, and works on her dissertation.

The job market has affected even her choice of a topic: appealing across disciplines, it suggests she could teach in a women's studies program as well as a German department. "More bang for the buck," she said.

Although Mr. Battles and Ms. Marshall are at the stage where they are doing as much as they can to secure their futures, they both feel they can't afford to worry about them.

"Being pessimistic now doesn't do me any good," Ms. Marshall said. "I'll be pessimistic later, when I don't get any calls."

Mr. Battles' goal is not only teaching, but a life of research; to pursue it, he must win a job at not just a college, but at a university with a rich library. He has seen other students commit themselves so totally to the competition that losing devastated them. And so he works to maintain an equilibrium that allows him to put almost everything into his research, while holding back enough to survive disappointment.

"The world's not going to end if Paul Battles does not become an English professor," he said. But he has always been at the top of every class, so he will see what happens this time. There are jobs out there, after all, maybe as many as a dozen last year in his field.

"My adviser keeps telling me, 'Good people get the jobs, good people get the jobs, be one of the good people and you'll get a job,' " he said. "So that's my mantra. Whenever I have doubts, I chant, 'Good people get the jobs.' "